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“... dissolved. Our ‘crisis’ of national identity has become an old friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of particular historical conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of ...”

“... figure in Jackson’s book were buzzing about the Sillars camp. Two of them – Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn – are very familiar to readers of this paper. Another, the economist George Kerevan, a former member of the International Marxist Group and then a Labour councillor, went on to become an influential nationalist commentator with fervently ...”

“... and Left Review, the contributors to New Left Review were provoked by the condition of what Tom Nairn called Ukania. But they distanced themselves from the old Ukanian Left. The country’s economy, they said, was in chronic decline, its politics were a comprehensive disaster, its society was stalled in defensive resentment, and there was no ...”

“... confidently referred to as ‘Great Britain’ but whose imminent fragmentation is prophesied by Tom Nairn and others. Unfortunately, Dr Widdowson and most of his contributors appear to share a deep hatred of art and to be united in a desire to abolish both texts and authors. They are frustrated sociologists who believe that sonnets and beer mats ought ...”

“... and locals who complain about the city’s ‘festivalisation’ are easy to caricature. In 1967, Tom Nairn wrote that ‘Edinburgh’s soul is Bible-black, pickled in boredom by centuries of sermons, swaddled in the shabby gentility of the Kirk – what difference could 21 years of Festival make to this?’ The city’s churches now see more ...”

“... little scope. But they signified that the various episodes of national development that Tom Nairn had seen Scotland dodging in the 19th century were suddenly swallowed in concentrated form. Just how distinctive the resulting discourse is became plain to me on reading Noel Annan’s Our Age. Here was a stylish narrative – of the English ...”

“... I began to meet the NLR circle and make friends among them. I liked and respected no one more than Tom Nairn, the Scottish nationalist-Marxist who in 1977 published his polemic The Break-up of Britain, which caused a real uproar and led to a stinging attack from Eric Hobsbawm, then the leading figure among the older generation of Marxist historians. The ...”

“... EU leaders, who have become ‘more sophisticated in navigating the shoals of treaty reform’. Tom Nairn argued that the EU suffers from a condition that also characterised the pre-First World War multinational empires: uneven development generates subtle forms of nationalist resistance which frustrate supranational designs. The EU has a fearsome ...”

“... physical exertion was banned. His mother sent him away from London to live with her family at Nairn, in north-eastern Scotland, on the shore of the Moray Firth. The years that he passed there built the emotional and imaginative foundations of his life. Some people contend that this is the most ‘Scottish’ part of Scotland, even in our own times. It’s ...”

“... who needed the illusion of an unsleeping and keenly ideological foe.)Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn’s book The Beginning of the End, which I read when it first came out, is more interesting now than it was then. It’s rather sporting of the current Nairn to allow it to be reprinted. At the time, it seemed to ...”

“... opposed to Britain and Britishness, is timely. Earlier this summer, a leader in the Times attacked Tom Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm and especially Linda Colley for supplying a tendentious, politicised justification for the break-up of Britain. Citing a recent article by J.C.D. Clark, the Times claimed that Britain and Britishness, far from being ...”

“... of two intellectuals who have put forward a case somewhat short of the Nationalist one: these are Tom Nairn and Neal Ascherson, both of whom are active in the organisation Common Cause – which, like Scotland United, is seeking to bring together with the Nationalists a largely leftist political movement. Their case is well-known: it depends on a series ...”

“... of the young cultural critics. He drew ideas from sources as diverse as Agnes Heller and Tom Nairn; in turn, his thought was rapidly and efficiently mined in the campaign against the ‘heritage industry’ which took shape in the later Eighties (I speak as one of the grateful miners). Now, though, an unexpected corner has been turned. The last ...”

“... The effect is to diminish arguments which are otherwise blameless: see also the essay ‘Tom Nairn and the Monarchy’. A more impressive example of Johnson’s truth-telling is his review of Hugo Young’s One of Us, ‘Thatcher’s New Order’, and there are several reasons for this. First, it is obviously a book he admires; second, he is ...”

“... to embrace the Scottish Enlightenment is one of the major ironies of Scottish intellectual life. Tom Nairn observed long ago that ‘if Scottish nationalists have ever been really united on one thing it is their constant execration and denunciation of Enlightenment culture.’ Indeed, William Ferguson, the leading proponent of a nationalist ...”